With last minute provisions inserted into the Senate’s coronavirus relief package by House Democrats that dictate permanent changes to election protocols, Speaker Pelosi’s party has removed all doubt as to whether they support voter fraud.
They do, and their carefully crafted provisions will make voter fraud a federally protected standard.
As of the writing of this editorial, we don’t know what will be passed in the Senate. But regardless of the outcome of COVID-19 relief, Democrats have shown their hand, and it is an ugly and tyrannical affront to our national ethos.
Cynically called the “Take Responsibility Act,” Democratic legislative changes remove the ability of states to manage the “Times, Places, and Manner” of elections as they have historically done under the Constitution’s Article I provisions.
Their input demands states allow 15 consecutive days of early voting, makes absentee voting universal, prohibits “requiring identification to obtain an absentee ballot,” allows “another person” to drop off absentee ballots and removes limits on how many can be delivered by one person, ensures provisional ballots are always counted (rendering them no longer “provisional”) and provides “blank” (no printed name) absentee ballots to citizens and service members overseas.
These changes—ostensibly in response to COVID-19 but all written as “permanent” in their proposed statutes—alter the face of American elections and could destroy the nation’s voting security and the integrity of the individual vote.
Under these changes, vote thieves could order a pile of absentee ballots with fictitious names and deliver them in a large basket to polling stations with no questions asked. This bill makes “ballot harvesting” a federal law, so political operatives could collect ballots from institutional settings and individuals, ensuring they are cast for the candidate of the operative’s choice.
With no ID to provide ballot security, and no chain of custody between voter and ballot, ballot boxes could be stuffed with votes from Fluffy and Rover as long as they have an address and the last four digits of a magical Social Security number.
There are already multiples cases of documented ballot harvesting fraud in the United States. In Texas in 2018, several vote harvesters—known in the state as “politiqueros”—were charged with marking and delivering ballots without voter consent. At least one of these fraudsters is not even a U.S. citizen.
In 2016, ACRU filed suit against Broward County, Florida supervisor of elections Brenda Snipes after reports that her employees were filling out absentee ballots and opening others in private. As a result of the lawsuit, Broward has made changes to its procedures, but it is only one of 3,141 counties in the United States.
After then-Governor Jerry Brown (D) of California legalized ballot harvesting four years ago, there was a noticeable uptick in bulk voting in 2018 elections. Orange County registrar of voters Neal Kelley noted, “people dropped off maybe 100 or 200 ballots.”
Other preposterous Democrat provisions such as a post office bailout, dictating “diversity” on the boards of companies who take relief money, $30 million to the mysterious “National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences,” and $300 million for “Migration and Refugee Assistance” when our borders should be locked up tight are an appalling abuse of taxpayer money, time and health.
As Democrats dare Republicans to pass outrageous provisions that provide no relief to hurting Americans, perhaps these extraneous spending requests are just a smokescreen for liberal politicians’ true agenda—allowing their on-the-ground swarm of vote collecting human assets an unfettered path to assuring one-party rule.
Although we don’t yet know how many of these provisions will pass in COVID-19 relief legislation, this is not the end of this particular liberal project. We will see it again and again, at the state and the federal level, as a lack of voter ID, same-day registration, ballot harvesting and unlimited ballot drops are the quickest way to ensure a political majority by malfeasance.
This is not a partisan issue, and should not be a partisan debate. That these provisions were written into a disaster relief bill created to protect human life and American employment during a time of unprecedented crisis is inhumane, immoral and the most extreme example of political selfishness ever demonstrated in the United States.
Speaker Pelosi and her fellow Democrats cannot expect us to believe that ballot harvesting initiatives and a ban on voter ID requirements protects us from a virus or ensures millions of Americans out of work because of it are able to pay their bills.
As the legislative undermining of America’s free and fair elections by one of our major political parties could bring about an electoral tyranny from which we may never recover, no American, regardless of political or ideological persuasion, should let it stand at any time.
Lori Roman is president of the American Constitutional Rights Union Action Fund, an organization dedicated to defending the constitutionally-protected civil rights of all Americans.
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